Yesterday, Howard programmed the XP10 on an OGD1 prototype board, put it into a Linux PC, powered it on, and didn't see smoke. Even better, lspci reports that that the card is recognized as a VGA capable device. Although I had done lots of RTL-level simulation, that PCI core has never before been tested in hardware, so it's pretty exciting to see it handle config space correctly.
Howard is working on diagnostic code right now, what I was talking about earlier. This code will enable memory decode, map the memory and register space, and perform initialization. Once we have verified that the XP10's internal memory-mapped registers are accessible, and we can talk to its peripherals, we can program the Xilinx chip and get it up and running, initialize memory, perform memory tests, start up video, display a picture, etc. Unfortunately, he's copying some code that we can't share, so we'll still need someone to eventually write a Free version of this. That pushes the VGA BIOS and the HQ microcode up in priority. The next tasks, things we really need help with, include: - HQ microcode. In the right mode, all PCI traffic to graphics memory is routed through this tiny microprocessor. It's primary purpose will be to work in the background, converting the VGA text display into raw pixels that can be scanned out by our video controller. A lot of information about VGA is on our wiki, but it may not be complete, so we could use some help with that. Personally, unless I'm tied up with some other hardware issue, I'd be happy to write the microcontroller code myself. The hard part, really, is just knowing what to DO, so if a few people could become experts on the details of things like the VGA IO space registers and other stuff like that, it would help me tremendously. - VGA BIOS. This should be something totally minimal. Just enough to set up video, program the HQ microcontroller, and get VGA text going. There's a well-documented table that goes at the head of the PROM. I need some help with laying out some assembly code for that table and the minimal VGA int10 stuff. That should go on in parallel to the HQ work. - The DDX. At first, we don't need a kernel driver. Paul Brooks wrote a DDX for OSCON, so it just needs to be hacked to work with the register layout of this card. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
